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For Sandra Tsing Loh, Change Is Good

The writer and performer, at home in Pasadena, Calif., has a new book and a one-woman show that explore, among other issues, menopause.Credit
Emily Berl for The New York Times

PASADENA, Calif. — “I just joined Twitter,” the writer and performer Sandra Tsing Loh announced into a good old-fashioned microphone. She was deep in the warren of the KPCC-FM public-radio station (wall-to-wall carpeting, office kitchen copiously stocked with herbal teas, a sound engineer who keeps bees), recording a segment for “The Loh Life,” one of her two long-running broadcasts here. Ads for Gold’s Gym flashed noiselessly, reprovingly, on a television screen overhead.

Reading from a printed script, waving her hand for emphasis like a rhythmic gymnast without a ribbon, Ms. Loh described commiserating over her meager number of Twitter followers — close to 300, as of this typing — with some other “tech-impaired, middle-aged” female authors.

“It’s like our Twitter feeds are artisanal,” she said.

Since Ms. Loh’s work has long trafficked in both one-liners and accusations of overshare, her avoidance of social media until now may seem discordant. A perpetual darling of the ever-beleaguered Los Angeles intelligentsia (“queen of the shoe box,” as she characterized her public-radio stardom) and constant candidate for that publishers’ holy grail, “the female David Sedaris,” Ms. Loh, 52, was given a national platform a decade ago as an essayist in The Atlantic magazine. From this she effectively performed a triple somersault with “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” (2009), in which she announced that she was leaving her husband of 20 years and questioned the very idea of modern marriage; “The Bitch Is Back” (2011), a paean to menopause; and “Daddy Issues” (2012), a declaration of her fervent wish, yet-ungranted, that her nettlesome 90-something father, Eugene, would just die already.

Ms. Loh has expanded these pieces, with emphasis on the least gasp-inducing middle one, into a new book, “The Madwoman in the Volvo,” and a one-woman show, with petite “Greek chorus,” that she will perform on Monday at Joe’s Pub in downtown Manhattan. In both, she distills from the work of Dr. Christiane Northrup that, contrary to conventional wisdom about hot flashes and hurled crockery, it is actually the fertile phase of a woman’s life that is one, literally, of lunacy.

“It’s like you lived on earth, and then you went to the moon, and lived there for a while,” Ms. Loh said. “Now you’re back where you started” — the hormone levels of a preadolescent — “and it’s, like, ‘Welcome home.’ ”

There is surely hope that this project may capture the same “you go, sister-girlfriend” mass audience that flocked to “The Vagina Monologues” in the 1990s, and more recently “Menopause: The Musical” and “Love, Loss and What I Wore,” a revival of which this month in Ventura, Calif., featured Ms. Loh, a somewhat frustrated actress who got her SAG accreditation in her 40s after appearing as a flight attendant in the 2006 film “Unaccompanied Minors” (she also played a professor in an episode of “The Office”).

But uplifting, easily mainstreamed messages have not been the calling card of her career — and maybe thank Goddess for that.

“You know, there aren’t that many explorations and celebrations of failure, of people who just don’t make it,” said Benjamin Schwarz, the former literary and national editor of The Atlantic, who hired her after reading the book “A Year in Van Nuys,” Ms. Loh’s lightly fictionalized memoir of living in an unfashionable part of the San Fernando Valley. He described that book as “underrated,” and suggested that its author’s sociopolitical credentials might be, as well. “She is well trained and well read in the feminist literature,” he said, “and I think she is somewhat hostile — and I use that word with some care — she is impatient with some of the preoccupations of the most privileged in our society.”

For instance: “I will never do Pilates,” Ms. Loh said. “I walk.”

It was the morning after the visit to the radio station, and she had just given a tour of the (modest-by-Los-Angeles-standards) 1907 Victorian house she shares with her new partner, Frier McCollister, a theatrical producer and her manager of over a decade, and Ms. Loh’s two daughters, Madeline, 13, and Susannah, 12, by her former husband, Mike Miller, a musician who has toured with Bette Midler.

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Sandra Tsing Loh is turning her new book into a one-woman show.

“Satan takes care of his children,” Ms. Loh said darkly, alluding to her luck finding the place in the wake of the breakup. There was a roll-top desk, cracked-leather furniture, faded carpets and bedroom walls painted a lusty shade that the author describes as “burnt Tangiers.” When a visitor admired a palm tree looming in the front yard, Mr. McCollister said, “It means we can’t have location shoots, because the house reads Midwestern.”

Wearing glasses and baggy clothes — she encapsulated her style to The Hollywood Reporter as “tool belt lesbian” — she got behind the wheel of not a Volvo but a red Prius. Tossed on the back seat was a hairbrush and an earth-science textbook. Though Ms. Loh often mocks herself for “limping through” the undergraduate physics program of Caltech and flunking the G.R.E. in dramatic style, she has not abandoned the discipline but rather sought to popularize it. An episode of her second radio program, “The Loh Down on Science,” had noted that one of the few known examples of true monogamy in nature is that of the tapeworm, whose “mates are literally fused together until death.”

She was headed toward the Athenaeum, a private club associated with the university that, thanks to its heavy aura of academic elite, may be described as the Polo Lounge of Pasadena, or, as Ms. Loh put it, “Mount Olympus.” Eugene Loh, a Chinese-American aerospace engineer, imparted to her that “scientists were the people who were really glamorous,” she said.

“Instead of Oscars season, it would be Nobel Prize season,” she continued, “and he would handicap who should’ve won.”

In the club’s stately wood-paneled dining room, she filled a plate from the buffet and further recapped her upbringing, mined for a late-1990s identity-politics hit, “Aliens in America,” alongside an older sister and brother and their towering German-American mother, Gisela, who, despite a tendency toward depression, sought culture for the children wherever her husband’s career took the family. “The headmistress of the Kirov Ballet would come to our villa in Cairo, smoke and eat cookies and then get off her stool and give us private lessons, off the banister upstairs where the laundry would hang,” Ms. Loh remembered.

She played viola in her high school orchestra; bumbled through college on “partial credit,” as she recounted in a 2005 Caltech commencement speech; fell in love with a rock bagpipes player; and enrolled in an English master’s program at the University of Southern California, where she was mentored by the writer T. Coraghessan Boyle, though he played down any influence later on the phone. “A shining light,” he said of Ms. Loh. “She came to me fully formed.”

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The star student won a Pushcart Prize for one of her short stories, but she was also dabbling energetically in the performance art modish in the 1980s, synchronizing carwashes to music and commissioning a midnight orchestral serenade to spawning grunion on the beach. Playing a piano piece on a freeway overpass — with “a captive audience,” she pointed out — got her written up in People.

“That was my taste of fame,” Ms. Loh said. Though she had aspired to be Yoko Ono, the experience more conjured Angelyne, the pneumatic blonde known for self-financed billboard appearances. “At first it was amazing, because people had been embarrassed for me when I had this idea,” Ms. Loh said. “Then they said, ‘You should hire a publicist, keep it rolling,’ and I go: ‘But I don’t sell anything. Why am I being famous for the sake of being famous?’ ”

Indeed, who could possibly imagine such a phenomenon?

It wouldn’t be the last time Ms. Loh was slightly out of step with her era. A lucrative deal to write a pilot for HBO based on her 1997 novel about moving to Los Angeles’s putative downtown, “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now,” faltered. “ ‘Sex and the City’ came up, and I was trying to write ‘Sex and the City’ with no sex and no city,” she said. And casting directors were befuddled by her mixed ethnicity. “I had a horrible agent who said: ‘You know, you do theater and performance art, but you cannot do sitcom acting. You make tea, and what is needed is a coffee maker.’ ”

Ms. Loh added lemonade to her arsenal (along with generous pours of merlot; among other family losses, Gisela died at age 69, after 10 years of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease). A piano-logue about errant dogs done with Ira Glass — “before he was Ira Glass,” she said — led to a modestly paid but steady deal with “Morning Edition” on NPR. There was occasional punch-up work, a gig for IMAX. “I was like: ‘I don’t want to write book reviews for The Atlantic! I don’t need this!’ ” Ms. Loh said.

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Ms. Loh in action onstage in 1996 in “Aliens in America.”Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

But like the legendary magazine editor Clay Felker, Mr. Schwarz, she said, had “a sense that women drive culture.” She began filing articles about food, frugality, conspicuous consumption and her impassioned crusade for public schools, turning the last into a well-reviewed multimedia opus, “Mother on Fire.”

The title was apt: hooking up with Mr. McCollister during a trip to Burning Man became the bomb detonated in her marriage. “During a five o’clock counseling appointment, as the golden late-afternoon sunlight spilled over the wall of Balinese masks — when given the final choice by our longtime family therapist, who stands in as our shaman, mother, or priest, I realized ... no,” wrote Ms. Loh, who would probably find an arch aperçu about the fabric of the deck chairs if she were sinking on the Titanic.

To Loh devotees who’d gotten to know Mr. Miller, her former husband, as a patient and supportive background character, this was sort of the “Oh, no, she didn’t” equivalent of Brad leaving Jen for Angelina. “I started frantically emailing friends at midnight to ask if they, too, had heard the news,” Amy Benfer wrote in Salon.

Some Atlantic commenters were scathing, especially as Ms. Loh appeared behind sunglasses in a promotional video taped from a 10-by-10-foot U-Haul storage trailer to which she was temporarily displaced, surrounded by her “earthly possessions,” neatly packed by her ex.

But as when she was fired from another public-radio station, KCRW-FM in 2004, after a staff member failed to bleep her uttering a curse on the air, Ms. Loh was sanguine about any backlash. “I don’t even remember — I had 12 horrible different things going on,” she said at the Athenaeum. “If I was going to pretend to be the supermom next door, it would’ve been counterfeit and a lie. I figured I had to write something out of a new place.”

She has had ample support from a group of mostly female Californian writers she calls S’lonsters (Mona Simpson, Ayelet Waldman and her fellow flame-throwing Atlantic contributor, Caitlin Flanagan), some of whom she summoned that night to the Boston Court Theater for feedback on “The Madwoman in the Volvo.”

For this, Ms. Loh changed into a black top and jeans, removed her glasses and put on dangling earrings.

“In Los Angeles, where I live, many women go off-site to turn 50,” she drawled from the stage, eliciting long and knowing laughter from the crowd.

At this Pussy Riot-ous, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Leaning In till-one-face-plants moment, Ms. Loh may finally be enough in sync with her times for a large payday. Or just be offering a long-overdue update of “The Silent Passage,” the germinal 1992 book on menopause by Mr. Felker’s widow, Gail Sheehy. But at the very least, she can expect a considerable uptick in Twitter followers.

As she said, with well-practiced wry resignation, “Ah well, as long as they ‘favorite’ it, it’s a good day.”